I've waited so many years to hear that Windows is dead, and when announcement is made we find Windows is supposed to be replaced by something worse.
A "web-based operating system"? So I have to be logged into the internet just to use my computer? I have to pay a subscription so I can continue using my computer?
Of course maybe "web-based operating system" is not the right term. From reading TFA it sounds like what they're really promoting is a virtual machine environment that all your apps run on rather than having dependencies on the physical machine. That wouldn't be so bad. But please keep the web out of it.
If you can't see that this is an astonishing departure from the status quo, then you really are blind. I'm not sure what kind of candidate it would take to impress people like you, short of a 35-year old gay atheist inuit liberatarian.
How about a former prisoner who refused to use family connections even to save his own life, and who overcame physical handicaps to become a successful U.S. Senator? That would impress me.
Really? Obama is 'just another democrat'? Is that what people smart enough to post in html on slashdot really think? I'm surprised it isn't obvious to more people how significant Obama is as a fundamentally new kind of candidate. More so even than JFK, Obama has inspired a whole new generation of voters to get involved in politics because they can actually relate to someone running for office.
Dang! Here I sit without any mod points to give this guy a +1 funny.
Why? Because for the first time in 40 years there is a contender who isn't a rich old white guy. For the first time EVER there is a real contender who isn't white.
If you believe his race is the most important thing about him, you do belong in his party. The rest of the slashdot crowd is probably a tad more sophisticated than that.
After this election, there is a very good chance that we'll have a president who does NOT hail from a family of either wealth or privilege or both; he'll be a Harvard-educated, self-made minority millionaire.
Do you remember Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton?
If you can't see that this is an astonishing departure from the status quo, then you really are blind. I'm not sure what kind of candidate it would take to impress people like you, short of a 35-year old gay atheist inuit liberatarian.
Ok, being libertarian would be impressive, buy why should we be especially impressed by a 35-year old gay atheist inuit?
Fortunately, the difference - if it is lost of slashdotters - is NOT lost on the rest of the world. 5 billion brown people in foreign countries know that Obama represents a tectonic shift in American politics, in American foreign-relations, and in American global leadership - economic, political, cultural, environmental, and more.
The U.S. needs a president for the U.S.. The rest of the world can get their own presidents so long as they don't threaten us with weapons of mass destruction (whether they are honest about actually having the weapons or not) or otherwise bother us or our allies.
One of my complaints when I first tried the Wii is that it doesn't match motion well. I assumed that over time the technology would get better and they would start making better controllers? So I hope this will become a standard part of newly manufactured Wii consoles rather than a way of nickel and diming people by first making them pay for the console then pay again for controllers that work. ~~~~
First - get out of the country for a year. Whether you learn the language or not, get out of the U.S. and experience life overseas. Once you get married or get tied to a well-paying job and mortgage you'll have a hard time doing anything like this, so do it while you're young. Spend a year in another country - a three week or even a three month vacation won't do it. You need to live there, not visit.
Second - Chinese is one of the hardest languages due to the disconnect between the writing and speaking. Unlike Spanish, you can't learn how to say a word and automatically be able to recognize it on a street sign as reinforcement. And you can see a word and simply remember the pronunciation to ask someone what it means later. Even if you're only trying to learn the speaking, the lack of reinforcement will be a handicap. Find out how much phonetics are used in a language before deciding to tackle it.
Third - You'll need to learn a language really well for it to help your career. I speak Chinese well enough to hold a polite conversation and handle daily life in Taipei, but not well enough to handle a general conversation or even figure out what a conversation I'm overhearing is about. Though if I know the topic and speaker well I can follow along for while. But that hasn't helped me a bit on the job. I can't be useful at a conference held in Chinese. I can't meet with Chinese clients. And even if I improved my Chinese ability a lot, there are plenty of immigrants from China around me who speak Chinese better. Perhaps you might get a job with a Chinese speaking company helping them interface with their English speaking clients and vendors - but you'll need to speak Chinese well enough to communicate with your co-workers.
Finally, get out of the country for a year. You'll never feel so alive and free again.
How about the various form of twinning that occur, which in rare cases leads to one twin actually becoming part of the other, and needing to be removed so that the fully grown twin can live? That other twin (which cannot survive in any scenario) is human, and it is its own entity.
Here's another case: A woman who with a serious medical condition becomes pregnant. She cannot survive to bring the child to term, and the child will not survive. Can an abortion be performed then? Saving one life instead of killing both of them?
Also, keep in mind, especially in the second case, it is rarely a 100% certainty. There is always a small chance that both will live. Would you require that a woman with a 1% chance of surviving take that chance? Why is that your decision to make? Why is that anyone's choice but her own?
How about all of the embryos that for one reason or another are destroyed by the body itself? Should we be trying to protect those as well? Should we spend money on protecting the "unborn" instead of say, cancer research?
Those embryos are just as much "potential individuals" as all of the children that don't exist because not every fertile human is continually having sex.
You has a lot of hard difficult questions, but (1) simply because they are hard or difficult doesn't mean society should avoid answering them and (2) they are not the question being asked here, which is about embryo selection. They may be related, but given the complexities they may all have answers that seem contradictory on first glance. Ethics, the good of society, the good of the individual, must all be balanced. But the key point is that in most of these cases we're dealing with, or might be dealing with, at least one innocent human life - and society and the state has a recognized interest in defending innocent human life. Therefor we cannot simply abandon our responsibility to protect innocent human life simply because the question is hard.
We even have to face the difficult questions of defending guilty human life. You can't just kill someone because they raped your wife or assaulted you.
scientific critical thinking is the only way to go (emphasis added)
That's very narrow minded of you. How can you be sure that only scientific thinking is correct? Can you prove it? Can you prove your logic is correct? Can you prove it without using circular logic (i.e. if you use logic to prove your logic correct, you have committed the fallacy of circular logic. If you use scientific experiment to prove the value of science, you are guilty of circular logic).
Science and logic are very useful, but to embrace a faith in them as the only source of truth is to deny their teachings.
I'm continually stunned on how bullshit laws like this keep popping up in a society that spells out a specific separation of church and state.
I'm continually stunned at how people think our society spells out "separation of church and state". We spell out "freedom of religion" and forbidding laws "especting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". If you can't understand the difference between that and "separation of church and state" then you need some of those lessons in critical thinking.
I was using it as an example of where you can point out that the kids shouldn't believe everything they're told. I assumed everyone reading Slashdot would know people knew the world was round.
If you're trying to teach your kids to be skeptical, public school provide excellent opportunities to make the realize they shouldn't take everything they're told at face value. By first grade most of the kids have learned that everyone but Columbus thought the world was flat.
Then there are the political BS the kids are fed. First they teach the kids that you shouldn't judge people by their race, then they teach them the first member of each race to do stuff. I still remember the puzzled look on my kids face when he quizzed me the race of the person who designed the Vietnam memorial and I asked him "Why does it matter?" He was in first grade and couldn't tell you where the Vietnam War was fought or who the major combatants were, but the school made sure he knew the race of the memorial's designer.
Pay attention to what your kids learn at school and the opportunities to teach them skepticism will abound.
Google is making me smarter. While it's true I don't make an effort memorize quite as much as I used to, it's also true that I've been exposed to far more information than I ever would have been without the internet. My reasoning has been tested and refined by confronting other points of view that I never would have encountered without the internet.
I carried my passport around Taiwan for a year because the instructions on it said to keep it with you all the time. When i got soaked in the rain, it got soaked in the rain. It was in such bad shape when I tried to leave that the officials at the airport almost kept me from going. It was tough. I was tearing up because I was leaving my fiance for several months and instead of being able to just jump on the plane I had to stand around and answer questions. I wonder if I had been in China if they would have let me go.
As a Brit, why does his religion even matter?! ................
Because, for some unknown reason, a large portion of the people in the U.S. equate a person's religion with who they are. It's as if one of the reasons we broke from you folks has been completely forgotten.
Religion matters because it is something you choose that affects your entire life. Even if you were raised learning about a particular religion, you still choose whether to continue believing and following and how strictly to follow it. Personally, I would not vote for a Thuggee or Satanist.
We can differ over whether an atheist (perceived as logical, realistic, etc.) would be better than a Christian (perceived as recognizing he will have to answer for his actions because even if "might makes right" he's not the mightiest being in the world, also perceived as embracing values of service and love, etc.). We can disagree about those interpretations and which would make the better candidate, just as we often disagree about whether character is more important than ability, or whether a candidates ability to keep personal promises is important to thinking he can keep public promises.
One of the reasons we broke from the Brits is so we can have these disagreements and settle them at the ballot box without someone telling us what we can and cannot consider when deciding how to vote.
Even if you take an amoral approach, the responsibility of a corporations is to serve its owners. The most obvious way is by making money. But owners have other interests as well. As an owner I'm not well served if the corporation pays be a $10 dividend it earned by polluting my air and giving me cancer. As an American owner I'm not well served if my corporation pays me a $5 dividend it earned by selling advanced weaponry to China.
But taking a more enlightened view, owners of corporations are moral creatures who have moral obligations and moral duties. Our corporation should have the same moral obligations and moral duties we do because the corporation is acting our our behalf.
So yes, corporations should not just be good corporate citizens, they should also behave morally.
Physicists, with all their number crunching simulations and calculations, will make more use of computers than most people. If they want to make any important decisions about when and where to use computers, they'll need to understand what computers are capable of and have some understanding of how difficult it is to make computers do different tasks, and be able to understand what computer geeks tell them about the memory requirements of performing a simulation of every particle in the universe.
The best way to achieve this is to require the physics students to take a programming 101 class in a procedural language like FORTRAN, Java, or C.
Outside of national defense, this would be considered a "Personal Service Contract" which can have a term of up to 7 years, as commonly used within the music industry.
You mean if you skip out on one of these contracts they can hunt you down and kill you, or at best throw you in prison for several years? In the the military desertion has a maximum penalty of death. I knew the music industry was harsh but...
I wish I had time for an equally thoughtful response, but I'll have to focus on one point - that YouTube is not the military and therefor its rights are protected. I have two response. First I don't recall anywhere in the U.S. Constitution where it says you lose your rights when you join the military but we all know that to a large extent it happens. Second, it is not simply a matter of restricting what our loyal citizens see and hear. If that were the case then of course we would have little or no need for censorship. But in fact the videos in question will be seen by many people not on our side, or people who might be easily persuaded to join the other side, perhaps even people who are suicidal and might become willing bombers.
It is in my opinion a balancing act. We have to weigh the dangers of tyranny from within against the dangers of tyranny from without. What good is it to protect ourselves from the fascists abroad if we become fascists at home? But equally, what good does it do to protect ourselves from the fascists at home if we succumb to the fascists abroad?
Or, leaving aside the existential question of actually being overrun by the fascists from overseas, this hypothetical is important to consider. What if we were sure, to whatever standard of proof one desires, that by restricting the speech in question we would save the lives of 10 American soldiers. How about 20? 100? 1000? 100,000? 1,000,000? At what point do we decide it's worth it?
You're right that it would be nice if more people thought about these questions.
I don't hate America; I realize that America has a long time of curtailing freedoms during wartime, and even outside of wartime, for the sake of national defense so that freedoms can be protected.
Did you know, for example, that the people in our "volunteer military" aren't allowed to leave if they change their minds? Outside of national defense, this would be considered a form of slavery and would not be permitted. You can't sell yourself into slavery or even rent yourself into slavery as a civilian. But when you joint the military, that's essentially what you are.
And for most of our history when our freedoms have been threatened by violence, we've resorted to pressing young men into involuntary servitude to do difficult and dangerous work. And yes, one of the freedoms they lose when that happens is freedom of speech.
This youtube thing wouldn't be a complete revocation of free speech, but would be measured in response to the threats we face.
Yes, we always have limits, but the devil's in the details as they say. For example, do you think you can institute a rule like "undermines the national security" with any degree of agreement on what constitutes undermining? If posting these videos undermines the country, does not it also undermine the country to reveal corruption and illegal activities in our own government?
In this case since Youtube is private and own the site, they can enforce the rules as they see fit. I would agree with your concern about vagueness were I proposing a law. But I was proposing an addition to Youtubes guidelines. It won't have to be argued in court and it won't be used to throw anyone in jail.
Have to destroy the village (personal freedoms) to save it, eh?
That is how it is often done. The American Revolution, the American Civil War that ended slavery in the U.S., World War II - all forced young men into involuntary servitude (aka slavery) to do difficult and life-threatening work. Not only was personal freedom curtailed, but the right to life of hundreds of thousands of these men was permanently curtailed.
Even with todays volunteer military, those who join essentially sell themselves into time-limited slavery - they can't leave early if they change their minds. Outside of the military you can't sell yourself into slavery like that. But for the purpose of national defense we allow it.
except for robbing them of the very things they fight to protect. "I disagree with what you say but I will die to protect your right to say it" - this is the sort of model our nation was founded on, and this should be the model that all of us, including our soldiers, aspire to.
I'm not sure what benefit censoring Youtube has. Certainly censoring recruiting videos has benefit. Censoring they're beheadings and such may be counter-productive. But that's beside the point.
The point is that freedoms have always been sacrificed in part to preserve greater freedoms. Would our freedom of speech have happened without the American Revolution? We had a draft in that war. What is a draft? You force people to join a group where they are forced to obey orders and perform difficult and dangerous labor and are forbidden from leaving under penalty of death. Sounds a lot like slavery. We used a draft again to create more freedom (ironically by liberating slaves) in the American Civil War. We stopped the Nazis again by instituting draft slavery. In these wars we also curtailed freedom of speech.
Even with today's volunteer army, the soldiers are essentially selling themselves into time-limited slavery, something that is not otherwise allowed in the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
I've waited so many years to hear that Windows is dead, and when announcement is made we find Windows is supposed to be replaced by something worse. A "web-based operating system"? So I have to be logged into the internet just to use my computer? I have to pay a subscription so I can continue using my computer? Of course maybe "web-based operating system" is not the right term. From reading TFA it sounds like what they're really promoting is a virtual machine environment that all your apps run on rather than having dependencies on the physical machine. That wouldn't be so bad. But please keep the web out of it.
If you can't see that this is an astonishing departure from the status quo, then you really are blind. I'm not sure what kind of candidate it would take to impress people like you, short of a 35-year old gay atheist inuit liberatarian.
How about a former prisoner who refused to use family connections even to save his own life, and who overcame physical handicaps to become a successful U.S. Senator? That would impress me.
Really? Obama is 'just another democrat'? Is that what people smart enough to post in html on slashdot really think? I'm surprised it isn't obvious to more people how significant Obama is as a fundamentally new kind of candidate. More so even than JFK, Obama has inspired a whole new generation of voters to get involved in politics because they can actually relate to someone running for office.
Dang! Here I sit without any mod points to give this guy a +1 funny.
Why? Because for the first time in 40 years there is a contender who isn't a rich old white guy. For the first time EVER there is a real contender who isn't white.
If you believe his race is the most important thing about him, you do belong in his party. The rest of the slashdot crowd is probably a tad more sophisticated than that.
After this election, there is a very good chance that we'll have a president who does NOT hail from a family of either wealth or privilege or both; he'll be a Harvard-educated, self-made minority millionaire.
Do you remember Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton?
If you can't see that this is an astonishing departure from the status quo, then you really are blind. I'm not sure what kind of candidate it would take to impress people like you, short of a 35-year old gay atheist inuit liberatarian.
Ok, being libertarian would be impressive, buy why should we be especially impressed by a 35-year old gay atheist inuit?
Fortunately, the difference - if it is lost of slashdotters - is NOT lost on the rest of the world. 5 billion brown people in foreign countries know that Obama represents a tectonic shift in American politics, in American foreign-relations, and in American global leadership - economic, political, cultural, environmental, and more.
The U.S. needs a president for the U.S.. The rest of the world can get their own presidents so long as they don't threaten us with weapons of mass destruction (whether they are honest about actually having the weapons or not) or otherwise bother us or our allies.
One of my complaints when I first tried the Wii is that it doesn't match motion well. I assumed that over time the technology would get better and they would start making better controllers? So I hope this will become a standard part of newly manufactured Wii consoles rather than a way of nickel and diming people by first making them pay for the console then pay again for controllers that work. ~~~~
So that you have a chance to hear more than one side of the issue:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjNjYTNjMTVkNmVhMmYxN2JkMWZhMzYzMGNjNzY4ZDE=
First - get out of the country for a year. Whether you learn the language or not, get out of the U.S. and experience life overseas. Once you get married or get tied to a well-paying job and mortgage you'll have a hard time doing anything like this, so do it while you're young. Spend a year in another country - a three week or even a three month vacation won't do it. You need to live there, not visit. Second - Chinese is one of the hardest languages due to the disconnect between the writing and speaking. Unlike Spanish, you can't learn how to say a word and automatically be able to recognize it on a street sign as reinforcement. And you can see a word and simply remember the pronunciation to ask someone what it means later. Even if you're only trying to learn the speaking, the lack of reinforcement will be a handicap. Find out how much phonetics are used in a language before deciding to tackle it. Third - You'll need to learn a language really well for it to help your career. I speak Chinese well enough to hold a polite conversation and handle daily life in Taipei, but not well enough to handle a general conversation or even figure out what a conversation I'm overhearing is about. Though if I know the topic and speaker well I can follow along for while. But that hasn't helped me a bit on the job. I can't be useful at a conference held in Chinese. I can't meet with Chinese clients. And even if I improved my Chinese ability a lot, there are plenty of immigrants from China around me who speak Chinese better. Perhaps you might get a job with a Chinese speaking company helping them interface with their English speaking clients and vendors - but you'll need to speak Chinese well enough to communicate with your co-workers. Finally, get out of the country for a year. You'll never feel so alive and free again.
Just define the KG in terms of pounds at 1 G. Do Americans have to solve all of France's problems for them?
How about the various form of twinning that occur, which in rare cases leads to one twin actually becoming part of the other, and needing to be removed so that the fully grown twin can live? That other twin (which cannot survive in any scenario) is human, and it is its own entity.
Here's another case: A woman who with a serious medical condition becomes pregnant. She cannot survive to bring the child to term, and the child will not survive. Can an abortion be performed then? Saving one life instead of killing both of them?
Also, keep in mind, especially in the second case, it is rarely a 100% certainty. There is always a small chance that both will live. Would you require that a woman with a 1% chance of surviving take that chance? Why is that your decision to make? Why is that anyone's choice but her own?
How about all of the embryos that for one reason or another are destroyed by the body itself? Should we be trying to protect those as well? Should we spend money on protecting the "unborn" instead of say, cancer research?
Those embryos are just as much "potential individuals" as all of the children that don't exist because not every fertile human is continually having sex.
You has a lot of hard difficult questions, but (1) simply because they are hard or difficult doesn't mean society should avoid answering them and (2) they are not the question being asked here, which is about embryo selection. They may be related, but given the complexities they may all have answers that seem contradictory on first glance. Ethics, the good of society, the good of the individual, must all be balanced. But the key point is that in most of these cases we're dealing with, or might be dealing with, at least one innocent human life - and society and the state has a recognized interest in defending innocent human life. Therefor we cannot simply abandon our responsibility to protect innocent human life simply because the question is hard. We even have to face the difficult questions of defending guilty human life. You can't just kill someone because they raped your wife or assaulted you.
Science and logic should be taught as methods and tools, not as faiths. To say they are the only source of truth is to embrace them as a faith.
scientific critical thinking is the only way to go (emphasis added)
That's very narrow minded of you. How can you be sure that only scientific thinking is correct? Can you prove it? Can you prove your logic is correct? Can you prove it without using circular logic (i.e. if you use logic to prove your logic correct, you have committed the fallacy of circular logic. If you use scientific experiment to prove the value of science, you are guilty of circular logic).
Science and logic are very useful, but to embrace a faith in them as the only source of truth is to deny their teachings.
I'm continually stunned on how bullshit laws like this keep popping up in a society that spells out a specific separation of church and state.
I'm continually stunned at how people think our society spells out "separation of church and state". We spell out "freedom of religion" and forbidding laws "especting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". If you can't understand the difference between that and "separation of church and state" then you need some of those lessons in critical thinking.
The Boston Red Sox
The Chicago Cubs
I was using it as an example of where you can point out that the kids shouldn't believe everything they're told. I assumed everyone reading Slashdot would know people knew the world was round.
If you're trying to teach your kids to be skeptical, public school provide excellent opportunities to make the realize they shouldn't take everything they're told at face value. By first grade most of the kids have learned that everyone but Columbus thought the world was flat.
Then there are the political BS the kids are fed. First they teach the kids that you shouldn't judge people by their race, then they teach them the first member of each race to do stuff. I still remember the puzzled look on my kids face when he quizzed me the race of the person who designed the Vietnam memorial and I asked him "Why does it matter?" He was in first grade and couldn't tell you where the Vietnam War was fought or who the major combatants were, but the school made sure he knew the race of the memorial's designer.
Pay attention to what your kids learn at school and the opportunities to teach them skepticism will abound.
Google is making me smarter. While it's true I don't make an effort memorize quite as much as I used to, it's also true that I've been exposed to far more information than I ever would have been without the internet. My reasoning has been tested and refined by confronting other points of view that I never would have encountered without the internet.
I carried my passport around Taiwan for a year because the instructions on it said to keep it with you all the time. When i got soaked in the rain, it got soaked in the rain. It was in such bad shape when I tried to leave that the officials at the airport almost kept me from going. It was tough. I was tearing up because I was leaving my fiance for several months and instead of being able to just jump on the plane I had to stand around and answer questions. I wonder if I had been in China if they would have let me go.
As a Brit, why does his religion even matter?!
................
Because, for some unknown reason, a large portion of the people in the U.S. equate a person's religion with who they are. It's as if one of the reasons we broke from you folks has been completely forgotten.
Religion matters because it is something you choose that affects your entire life. Even if you were raised learning about a particular religion, you still choose whether to continue believing and following and how strictly to follow it. Personally, I would not vote for a Thuggee or Satanist.
We can differ over whether an atheist (perceived as logical, realistic, etc.) would be better than a Christian (perceived as recognizing he will have to answer for his actions because even if "might makes right" he's not the mightiest being in the world, also perceived as embracing values of service and love, etc.). We can disagree about those interpretations and which would make the better candidate, just as we often disagree about whether character is more important than ability, or whether a candidates ability to keep personal promises is important to thinking he can keep public promises.
One of the reasons we broke from the Brits is so we can have these disagreements and settle them at the ballot box without someone telling us what we can and cannot consider when deciding how to vote.
Even if you take an amoral approach, the responsibility of a corporations is to serve its owners. The most obvious way is by making money. But owners have other interests as well. As an owner I'm not well served if the corporation pays be a $10 dividend it earned by polluting my air and giving me cancer. As an American owner I'm not well served if my corporation pays me a $5 dividend it earned by selling advanced weaponry to China.
But taking a more enlightened view, owners of corporations are moral creatures who have moral obligations and moral duties. Our corporation should have the same moral obligations and moral duties we do because the corporation is acting our our behalf.
So yes, corporations should not just be good corporate citizens, they should also behave morally.
Physicists, with all their number crunching simulations and calculations, will make more use of computers than most people. If they want to make any important decisions about when and where to use computers, they'll need to understand what computers are capable of and have some understanding of how difficult it is to make computers do different tasks, and be able to understand what computer geeks tell them about the memory requirements of performing a simulation of every particle in the universe.
The best way to achieve this is to require the physics students to take a programming 101 class in a procedural language like FORTRAN, Java, or C.
Outside of national defense, this would be considered a "Personal Service Contract" which can have a term of up to 7 years, as commonly used within the music industry.
You mean if you skip out on one of these contracts they can hunt you down and kill you, or at best throw you in prison for several years? In the the military desertion has a maximum penalty of death. I knew the music industry was harsh but...
A very thoughtful reply. Thank you.
I wish I had time for an equally thoughtful response, but I'll have to focus on one point - that YouTube is not the military and therefor its rights are protected. I have two response. First I don't recall anywhere in the U.S. Constitution where it says you lose your rights when you join the military but we all know that to a large extent it happens. Second, it is not simply a matter of restricting what our loyal citizens see and hear. If that were the case then of course we would have little or no need for censorship. But in fact the videos in question will be seen by many people not on our side, or people who might be easily persuaded to join the other side, perhaps even people who are suicidal and might become willing bombers.
It is in my opinion a balancing act. We have to weigh the dangers of tyranny from within against the dangers of tyranny from without. What good is it to protect ourselves from the fascists abroad if we become fascists at home? But equally, what good does it do to protect ourselves from the fascists at home if we succumb to the fascists abroad?
Or, leaving aside the existential question of actually being overrun by the fascists from overseas, this hypothetical is important to consider. What if we were sure, to whatever standard of proof one desires, that by restricting the speech in question we would save the lives of 10 American soldiers. How about 20? 100? 1000? 100,000? 1,000,000? At what point do we decide it's worth it?
You're right that it would be nice if more people thought about these questions.
I don't hate America; I realize that America has a long time of curtailing freedoms during wartime, and even outside of wartime, for the sake of national defense so that freedoms can be protected.
Did you know, for example, that the people in our "volunteer military" aren't allowed to leave if they change their minds? Outside of national defense, this would be considered a form of slavery and would not be permitted. You can't sell yourself into slavery or even rent yourself into slavery as a civilian. But when you joint the military, that's essentially what you are.
And for most of our history when our freedoms have been threatened by violence, we've resorted to pressing young men into involuntary servitude to do difficult and dangerous work. And yes, one of the freedoms they lose when that happens is freedom of speech.
This youtube thing wouldn't be a complete revocation of free speech, but would be measured in response to the threats we face.
Yes, we always have limits, but the devil's in the details as they say. For example, do you think you can institute a rule like "undermines the national security" with any degree of agreement on what constitutes undermining? If posting these videos undermines the country, does not it also undermine the country to reveal corruption and illegal activities in our own government?
In this case since Youtube is private and own the site, they can enforce the rules as they see fit. I would agree with your concern about vagueness were I proposing a law. But I was proposing an addition to Youtubes guidelines. It won't have to be argued in court and it won't be used to throw anyone in jail.
Have to destroy the village (personal freedoms) to save it, eh?
That is how it is often done. The American Revolution, the American Civil War that ended slavery in the U.S., World War II - all forced young men into involuntary servitude (aka slavery) to do difficult and life-threatening work. Not only was personal freedom curtailed, but the right to life of hundreds of thousands of these men was permanently curtailed.
Even with todays volunteer military, those who join essentially sell themselves into time-limited slavery - they can't leave early if they change their minds. Outside of the military you can't sell yourself into slavery like that. But for the purpose of national defense we allow it.
except for robbing them of the very things they fight to protect. "I disagree with what you say but I will die to protect your right to say it" - this is the sort of model our nation was founded on, and this should be the model that all of us, including our soldiers, aspire to.
I'm not sure what benefit censoring Youtube has. Certainly censoring recruiting videos has benefit. Censoring they're beheadings and such may be counter-productive. But that's beside the point.
The point is that freedoms have always been sacrificed in part to preserve greater freedoms. Would our freedom of speech have happened without the American Revolution? We had a draft in that war. What is a draft? You force people to join a group where they are forced to obey orders and perform difficult and dangerous labor and are forbidden from leaving under penalty of death. Sounds a lot like slavery. We used a draft again to create more freedom (ironically by liberating slaves) in the American Civil War. We stopped the Nazis again by instituting draft slavery. In these wars we also curtailed freedom of speech.
Even with today's volunteer army, the soldiers are essentially selling themselves into time-limited slavery, something that is not otherwise allowed in the United States.